Every people, not limited to women, desire to look beautiful by others. In order to satisfy such a desire, various cosmetic products have been developed. Among them, basic cosmetic products which enhance the functions of the skin and make-up cosmetic products for decoration by means of optical effects can be exemplified. Among these cosmetic products, make-up cosmetic products are thought to be most contributing to making people look beautiful. Consumers mention this point as one of the largest motivations to use make-up cosmetic products.
However, methods of using make-up cosmetic products often depend on the experience and favor of each person. Thus, although scientific guidelines for a method for using a cosmetic product have recently been improved remarkably, it cannot be considered satisfactory at present.
Foundation, in particular, has been known to bear factors to make the skin look beautiful in addition to color and physical properties such as covering ability. For example, technique to make the skin look beautiful has been developed making use of optical effects such as defocusing make-up. We should say, however, that the optical effects and the mechanism to make people look beautiful have not been fully clarified.
That is to say, clarification of the theory to make people look beautiful and a development of a method for evaluating a make-up cosmetic product represented by foundation using the theory have been sought.
At the same time, it has been already known that color and design of costumes, etc., give different impression of beauty, etc., according to the shape and quality of the object to be decorated. For example, for this reason, when women with ordinary appearance wear a dress which looked beautiful when worn by a first-ranked model, the dress is not attractive as such. Also for this reason, color feeling or merits or demerits of the dress cannot be recognized by only watching the dress worn by a mannequin for a costume exhibition. Since even mannequins with a three-dimensional structure provides such a situation, two-dimensional photographs are so much the worse. It is natural that a lot of complaints stating that products shown in catalogues are quite different from real products are made.
As described above, as a significant factor of the cause giving different impression of beauty according to the objects to be decorated, the fact that the texture of human skin, the object, on mannequins and in two-dimensional photos is remarkably different from that of human. Although it is therefore required to reproduce the texture of actual human skin, it is not easy to create decoration (make-up) with the actual texture of human skin artificially.
Various efforts have been made so far to reproduce the texture of human skin. For example, three-dimensional images that utilize polarization to make people to see offset images, respectively, by the right eye and the left eye, and hologram have been attempted. However, they are only an attempt from viewpoints of two-dimension. At present, technique to make decoration with three-dimensional texture of the skin has not yet been accomplished, though it is required.
On the other hand, in the field of cosmetic products, although make-up to paint whole the face thickly, such as Kumadori for Kabuki, has been a main stream, beauty of sensitive feeling has recently taken a favorable turn. As make-up technique to realize such texture, defocusing make-up as mentioned above, etc., have been developed. With respect to these techniques, however, although the texture has been remarkably improved, problems in covering ability, etc., remain. That is, we await the development of make-up cosmetic products with excellent covering ability while possessing the ability to provide the texture of the skin.